Zelig Production How did they make the film look like newsreels of the 1920s? Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis used a variety of techniques, including locating some of the antique film cameras and lenses used during the eras Did they actually use any old footage? even going so far as to simulate damage, such as crinkles and scratches, on the negatives to make the finished product look more like vintage footage. Who appears in the old footage? The film uses cameo appearances by real figures from academia and other fields for comic effect. Can you name some of the academic figures? They include essayist Susan Sontag, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, Are there any famous people of the era that appear in the movie? Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Clara Bow, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Fanny Brice, Carole Lombard, Dolores del Rio, Were the effects easy to pull off? The virtually seamless blending of old and new footage was achieved almost a decade before digital filmmaking technology made such techniques in films like Forrest Gump
Are any parts of the movie in color?
Are any parts of the movie in color Zelig, Production made?
Allen used newsreel footage and inserted himself and other actors into the footage using bluescreen technology. To provide an authentic look to his scenes, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis used a variety of techniques, including locating some of the antique film cameras and lenses used during the eras depicted in the film, and even going so far as to simulate damage, such as crinkles and scratches, on the negatives to make the finished product look more like vintage footage. The virtually seamless blending of old and new footage was achieved almost a decade before digital filmmaking technology made such techniques in films like Forrest Gump (1994) and various television advertisements much easier to accomplish.  The film uses cameo appearances by real figures from academia and other fields for comic effect. Contrasting the film's vintage black-and-white film footage, these persons appear in color segments as themselves, commenting in the present day on the Zelig phenomenon as if it really happened. They include essayist Susan Sontag, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, political writer Irving Howe, historian John Morton Blum, and the Paris nightclub owner Bricktop.  Also appearing in the film's vintage footage are Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Clara Bow, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Fanny Brice, Carole Lombard, Dolores del Rio, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goring, James Cagney, Jimmy Walker, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Adolphe Menjou, Claire Windsor, Tom Mix, Marie Dressler, Bobby Jones, and Pope Pius XI.  In the time it took to complete the film's special effects, Allen filmed A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Broadway Danny Rose. CANNOTANSWER
Allen used newsreel footage and inserted himself and other actors into the footage using bluescreen technology.
Zelig is a 1983 American mockumentary film written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Allen and Mia Farrow. Allen plays Leonard Zelig, a nondescript enigma, who, apparently out of his desire to fit in and be liked, unwittingly takes on the characteristics of strong personalities around him. The film, presented as a documentary, recounts his period of intense celebrity in the 1920s, including analyses by contemporary intellectuals.

The film was nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Costume Design. It was well received by critics, receiving a 100% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Style 
Zelig was photographed and narrated in the style of 1920s black-and-white newsreels, which are interwoven with archival footage from the era and re-enactments of real historical events. Color segments from the present day include interviews of real and fictional personages, including Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag.

Plot 
Set in the 1920s and 1930s, the film concerns Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a nondescript man who has the ability to transform his appearance to that of the people who surround him. He is first observed at a party by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who notes that Zelig related to the affluent guests in a refined Boston accent and shared their Republican sympathies, but while in the kitchen with the servants, he adopted a coarser tone and seemed to be more of a Democrat. He soon gains international fame as a "human chameleon".

Interviewed in one of the witness shots, Bruno Bettelheim makes the following comment:

Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is a psychiatrist who wants to help Zelig with this strange disorder when he is admitted to her hospital. Through the use of hypnotism, she discovers Zelig yearns for approval so strongly that he physically changes to fit in with those around him. Dr. Fletcher eventually cures Zelig of his compulsion to assimilate, but goes too far in the other direction; for a brief period he is so intolerant of others' opinions that he gets into a brawl over whether or not it is a nice day.

Dr. Fletcher realizes that she is falling in love with Zelig. Because of the media coverage of the case, both patient and doctor become part of the popular culture of their time. However, fame is the main cause of their division. Numerous women claim that he married and impregnated them, causing a public scandal. The same society that made Zelig a hero destroys him.

Zelig's illness returns, and he tries to fit in once more, before he disappears. Dr. Fletcher finds him in Germany working with the Nazis before the outbreak of World War II. Together they escape, as Zelig uses his ability to imitate one more time, mimicking Fletcher's piloting skills and flying them back home across the Atlantic upside down. They eventually return to America, where they are proclaimed heroes and marry to live full happy lives.

Cast 

With Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Bricktop, Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, and Professor John Morton Blum as themselves.

Production 
Allen used newsreel footage, and inserted himself and other actors into it, using bluescreen technology. To provide an authentic look to his scenes, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis used a variety of techniques, including locating some of the antique film cameras and lenses used during the eras depicted in the film, and even going so far as to simulate damage, such as crinkles and scratches, on the negatives to make the finished product look more like vintage footage. The virtually seamless blending of old and new footage was achieved almost a decade before digital filmmaking technology made such techniques in films like Forrest Gump (1994) and various television advertisements much easier to accomplish.

The film uses cameo appearances by real figures from academia and other fields for comic effect. Contrasting the film's vintage black-and-white film footage, these persons appear in color segments as themselves, commenting in the present day on the Zelig phenomenon as if it really happened. They include essayist Susan Sontag, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, political writer Irving Howe, historian John Morton Blum, and the Paris nightclub owner Bricktop.

Also appearing in the film's vintage footage are Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Clara Bow, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Fanny Brice, Carole Lombard, Dolores del Río, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, James Cagney, Jimmy Walker, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Adolphe Menjou, Claire Windsor, Tom Mix, Marie Dressler, Bobby Jones, and Pope Pius XI.

In the time it took to complete the film's special effects, Allen filmed A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Broadway Danny Rose. This is Orion Pictures' last film to be released through Warner Bros.

Release 
Before being shown at the Venice Film Festival, the film opened on six screens in the US and grossed US$60,119 on its opening weekend; it eventually earned US$11.8 million in North America.

Critical reaction 
Zelig has an approval rating of 100% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 27 reviews, with an average score of 8/10. The site's consensus reads: "Wryly amusing, technically impressive, and ultimately thought-provoking, Zelig represents Woody Allen in complete command of his craft".

In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby observed:

Variety said the film was "consistently funny, though more academic than boulevardier", and the Christian Science Monitor called it "amazingly funny and poignant". Time Out described it as "a strong contender for Allen's most fascinating film", while TV Guide said, "Allen's ongoing struggles with psychoanalysis and his Jewish identity – stridently literal preoccupations in most of his work – are for once rendered allegorically. The result is deeply satisfying". Gene Siskel gave the film two stars out of four, calling it "a beautifully made but slight fable." Pauline Kael wrote that when the film was over "I felt good, but I was still a little hungry for a movie. There's a reason 'Zelig' seems small; there aren't any characters in it, not even Zelig."

Colin Greenland reviewed Zelig for Imagine magazine, and stated that "Woody Allen's most irresistable film for quite a while. He has found a new way to make fun of his own neuroses without exposing us to the egoism which became so overbearing in Manhattan or Stardust Memories."

It ranked 588th among critics, and 546th among directors, in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made. Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly listed the work as one of Allen's finest, lauding it as "a spot-on homage to vintage newsreels and a seamless exercise in technique." The Daily Telegraph film critics Robbie Collin and Tim Robey also named it as a career highlight and argued, "The special effects, in which Allen is seamlessly inserted into vintage newsreels, are still astonishing, and draw out the aching tragicomedy of Zelig's plight. He's the original man who wasn't there." Calum Marsh of Slant magazine wrote, "We are infinitely pliable. That's the thesis of Zelig, Allen's wisest film, which has much to say about the way a person can be bent and contorted in the name of acceptance. Its ostensibly wacky conceit ... is grounded in an emotional and psychological reality all too familiar to shrug off as farce. We'll go very far out of our way to avoid conflict. Zelig seizes on that weakness and forces us to recognize it."

Awards and nominations 

 56th Academy Awards
 Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Gordon Willis, nominee)
 Academy Award for Best Costume Design (Santo Loquasto, nominee)
 37th British Academy Film Awards
 BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay (nominee)
 BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography (nominee)
 BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects (nominee)
 BAFTA Award for Best Editing (nominee)
 BAFTA Award for Best Makeup (nominee)
 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen (nominee)
 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography (Gordon Willis, nominee)

 41st Golden Globe Awards
 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy (nominee)
 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Woody Allen, nominee)
 Saturn Award for Best Direction (nominee)
 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Cinematography (winner)
 Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress (Mia Farrow, winner; tied with Linda Hunt for The Year of Living Dangerously)
 Belgian Film Critics Association: Grand Prix (winner)
 David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor (Allen, winner)
 Venice Film Festival Pasinetti Award for Best Film (winner)
 Bodil Award for Best Non-European Film (winner)

Soundtrack
 Leonard the Lizard (1983) - Composed by Dick Hyman - Sung by Bernie Kuce, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells
 Doin' the Chameleon (1983) - Composed by Dick Hyman - Sung by Bernie Kuce, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells
 Chameleon Days (1983) - Composed by Dick Hyman - Performed by Mae Questel
 You May Be Six People, But I Love You (1983) - Composed by Dick Hyman - Sung by Bernie Kuce, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells
 Reptile Eyes (1983) - Composed by Dick Hyman - Sung by Rose Marie Jun
 The Changing Man Concerto (1983) - Composed by Dick Hyman
 I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling (1929) - Music by Fats Waller (as Thomas 'Fats' Waller) and Harry Link - Sung by Roz Harris
 I'm Sitting on Top of the World (1925) - Music by Ray Henderson - Sung by Norman Brooks
 Ain't We Got Fun (1921) - Music by Richard A. Whiting - Performed by The Charleston City All Stars
 Sunny Side Up (1929) - Music and Lyrics by Ray Henderson, Lew Brown and Buddy G. DeSylva - Performed by The Charleston City All Stars
 I'll Get By (1928) - Music by Fred E. Ahlert - Performed by The Ben Bernie Orchestra
 I Love My Baby, My Baby Loves Me (1925) - Music by Harry Warren - Performed by The Charleston City All Stars
 Runnin' Wild (1922) - Music by A.H. Gibbs - Performed by The Charleston City All Stars
 A Sailboat in the Moonlight (1937) - Written by Carmen Lombardo and John Jacob Loeb (as John Loeb) - Performed by The Guy Lombardo Orchestra
 Charleston (1923) - Music by James P. Johnson - Performed by Dick Hyman
 Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)(1922) - Written by Fred Fisher - Performed by Dick Hyman
 Five Feet Two, Eyes of Blue (1925) - Music by Ray Henderson - Performed by Dick Hyman
 Anchors Aweigh (1906) - Music by Charles A. Zimmerman - Modified by Domenico Savino (1950) - Performed by Dick Hyman
 Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1908) - Music by Albert von Tilzer 
 The Internationale (1888) - Music by Pierre De Geyter

See also 
 Environmental dependency syndrome
 The Belonging Kind

References

Bibliography

External links 

 
 
 

American films
1983 films
American fantasy-comedy films
American independent films
American satirical films
American black-and-white films
1980s fantasy-comedy films
English-language films
Films directed by Woody Allen
Films set in the 1920s
Films set in 1928
Films set in 1929
Films set in the 1930s
Films set in 1930
Films set in 1931
Films set in 1932
Films set in New York City
Films shot in New Jersey
Great Depression films
American mockumentary films
Orion Pictures films
Films with screenplays by Woody Allen
Films produced by Robert Greenhut
Cultural depictions of Charles Lindbergh
Cultural depictions of Charlie Chaplin
Cultural depictions of Al Capone
Cultural depictions of William Randolph Hearst
Cultural depictions of Josephine Baker
Cultural depictions of Adolf Hitler
Cultural depictions of Hermann Göring
Cultural depictions of James Cagney
Cultural depictions of Babe Ruth
1983 comedy films
Natural color was a term used in the beginning of film and later on in the 1920s, and early 1930s as a color film process that actually filmed color images, rather than a color tinted or colorized movie. The first natural color processes were in the 1900s and 1910s and were two color additive color processes or red and green missing primary color blue, one additive process of time was Kinemacolor. By the 1920s, subtractive color was mostly in use with such processes as Technicolor, Prizma and Multicolor, but Multicolor was mostly never in use in the late 1920s, Technicolor was mostly in  use. The only one who cared to mess with Multicolor was William Fox, probably because Multicolor was more cheaper of a process and at the time in 1929 William Fox was in debt. The difference between additive color and subtractive color were that an additive color film required a special projector that could project two components of film at the same time, a green record and a red record. But additive color didn't required a special projector, the two pieces of film were chemically formed together and was projected in one strip of film.

One of the first movies to use subtractive color was a silent film titled Cupid Angling (1918). In 1932, Walt Disney made the first film to use a red, green and blue color process (Technicolor), Flowers and Trees. Three years later, the first feature length movie to be filmed entirely in 3-color Technicolor was Becky Sharp.

1900-1909

1910s
The first color features were made in the 1910s. The very first was With Our King and Queen Through India (1912). In 1917, Technicolor made their first film, a two-color additive film entitled The Gulf Between (1917), The Gulf Between was also the first color feature in America, but rather than being filmed in Hollywood it was actually filmed in Jacksonville Florida. Today The Gulf Between is lost.

1920s
In 1922, Technicolor made their second feature and also the first movie made in their second color process, called process 2. The movie was The Toll of the Sea. It was the first color feature made in Hollywood. The movie starred Anna May Wong. Wong never thought the movie would ever make it to the screen, but it did. In 1923, Paramount Pictures made the Cecil B. De Mille partial Technicolor epic The Ten Commandments, which would be remade 33 years later by DeMille in 1956, also in color by Technicolor. Also in 1923, Prizma was used to film the 1923 version of Vanity Fair. The third feature to be filmed entirely in color by Technicolor was Wanderer of the Wasteland, today a lost film, released in 1924. It was advertised as being filmed in 100% Natural Color. Technicolor made many more silent films in color through the years, but in 1929, the first talking picture to use a color (Technicolor) sequence was The Broadway Melody. The color hues of that sequence are lost; the sequence only survives in black-and-white television prints from the 1950s. That year, Warner Bros. made the first all color-all talking movie, On with the Show, which also only survives in black and white, with only a small fragment of surviving color, found in 2005. Later in 1929, the first color talking movies were being made, such as Paris (Warner Bros.), Rio Rita (RKO, first RKO color movie, color sequenced),  Sally (Warner Bros., third all-color, all-talking feature), Gold Diggers of Broadway (Warner Bros., second all-color, all-talking feature), The Hollywood Revue (MGM's second musical, after The Broadway Melody) and many more. Most of the color talking movies made in 1929 mostly survive in 1950s black-and-white television copies or with color sequences cut. In 1929, Technicolor was so busy filming color movies that the Warner Bros. musical revue The Show of Shows (1929), which was originally going to be filmed in full color, had to be filmed only mostly in color, with 21 minutes in black and white, a seventeen-minute section of part one and a four-minute opening of part two. While most companies used Technicolor, William Fox, owner of Fox Movie Corporation, used Multicolor.

1930s
Color movies released in 1930 included The Life of the Party (Warner Bros.), Under a Texas Moon (Warner Bros.), Children of Pleasure (MGM), Chasing Rainbows (MGM), Show Girl in Hollywood (Warner Bros., one of Al Jolson's first color appearances), Viennese Nights (Warner Bros.), Hit the Deck (RKO Radio Pictures), and Leathernecking (RKO), The Cuckoos (RKO). Like 1929, the original color negatives for many movies of the year are considered lost and only survive in black-and-white due to the studios wanting more space in their film vaults so they threw away the films and aired them on black-and-white television before, but some color movies from this time have been found throughout the years.

In 1932, Walt Disney released the first three-color Technicolor film, Flowers and Trees. 1939, which is considered by many film buffs as Hollywood's greatest year, had hits in color, such as The Wizard of Oz, The Women, Dodge City and the most successful of them all, Gone with the Wind.

Color film processes
Process has been explained in a 1940 publishing, and in a 2013 historic overview.

See also
 List of early color feature films 
 His Supreme Moment (1925)

References

Film and video technology Letters in the Wind () is a 2002 critically acclaimed Iranian film. It was the directorial debut of Ali Reza-Amini.

Storyline
The story of the movie follows a group of newbie recruits to the Iranian Army, and their life in boot camp. It follows the lives of two of the soldiers, Taghi and Faramarz (eponymous actors), while the rest of the cast are deliberately left anonymous. It follows one of the soldiers (Taghi) on a day's leave to Tehran after he wins a bayonet-hoisting competition. The boot camp incidents center on a cassette recording of an unknown female voice, which everyone in camp takes turns to listen to. The Tehran furlough incidents center on the soldier Taghi playing back recorded messages on the phone to the family of each of the recruits at boot camp, recording the sounds of the city on cassette, and missing connections and getting into trouble due to his social ineptness. The movie ends after showing the discovery of the tapes recorded in Tehran by camp officials, and the news of the breakup of Faramarz and his girlfriend.

Direction
The movie is directed in a crisp, unemotional, documentary style of narration, with little music, with the exception of street music in Tehran, and marching music at the training camp (notably the Colonel Bogey March). Tersely made, the film is however full of candid humor.

Controversy
The original 35 mm color version of the film was banned by the Government of Iran when the movie released in 2002. The movie was released in a gray tone digital version in the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival. The director based some parts of the movie on his own experiences in the Iran–Iraq War, referring to the movie as being made in the "belly of the army".

Reviews
Neil Young's Film Lounge

External links 
 

Iranian films
2002 films
Persian-language films
2002 directorial debut films